Duke4.net Forums: Descent corner - Duke4.net Forums

deuxsonic, on 28 June 2016 - 08:40 PM, said:

D2X-XL is a lot more comparable to Darkplaces for Quake than EDuke32 (or GZDoom for that matter).

The reason is that, similar to Darkplaces, the base port already adds a lot of very fancy visual effects, such as smoke particles, explosion effects, light coronas, real time shadows, and even a different HUD, which stray quite far from the original's pixelated look.
D2X-XL goes a lot further than Darkplaces with Quake however, even adding numerous changes to gameplay, such as a radar, the ability to zoom in with the Vulcan or Gauss cannon, dual missile launch and even bullet time (for some reason). You can toggle them, but they are there nonetheless.

EDuke32 or GZDoom on the other hand mostly leave these kinds of changes up to the modders to implement, even with the Polymer/OpenGL renderer active.

Additionally, a couple of years ago I experienced a particularly nasty bug in D2X-XL related to savegames in secret levels (which normally aren't allowed) that somehow always made me respawn in the secret level when I died, no matter if I started a new game or not.
DXX-Rebirth is a lot less prone to bugs like this, as it keeps its feature list much smaller. That, the above, and the fact that D2X-XL doesn't seem to be in active development anymore is why I would recommend DXX-rebirth over D2X-XL, even for people who are used to ports like GZDoom.

i'd say d2x-xl is more comparable to doomsday than darkplaces. darkplaces is nowhere near as arrogant, buggy and stagnant

dxx-rebirth is descent's quakespasm, though i really hate the fact i can't turn off additive lasers

deuxsonic, on 28 June 2016 - 06:40 PM, said:

How about "Descent Anniversary Edition?"

I like rebirth the best for having persistent bot debris

I have heard horror stories about the d2x creator tho

Like I said, if anyone needs a copy of a properly working 1.5 executable just let me know and I can share it, it's no biggie.

Bloodshot, on 02 July 2016 - 12:23 PM, said:

It's literally a handicap though. You're creating tons of debris flying around the level that block all your regular projectiles.
I remember there even being a bug that prevented the Fusion cannon from passing through them, essentially making it useless while the option was active.

Also, I have no idea how it affects online play, as it's a clientside option that has a visible effect on gameplay.

The main issue that I had was with the developer of DXX-Rebirth because there is a bug that anyone who has played Descent has run into where on modern systems the high performance of the game will cause the mouse to basically lose almost all of it's sensitivity (it also makes any object that homes more and more difficult to avoid as the homing aspect is calculated per-frame so at a very high framerate the homing missiles for example become near impossible to avoid.) I came up with a really simple change that simply doubled whatever the input from the mouse was in order to fix the problem (it was like 1 extra line of code) which brought back a nice range of sensitivities and he got angry and said that adding it would be unfair to those who play the game keyboard only. I'm baffled by what he said... So because they choose to use only the keyboard we should keep the mouse broken? I was building his source with my change for a while because it works great but I felt he was being completely unreasonable.

I would use vsync for DXX-Rebirth. On my P200 MMX dodging missles is damn near impossible. Anything above 60 makes the game unfair as shit.

If you have lag issues, set the "Maximum Prerendered Frames" option to 1 in the Nvidia Control Panel. ATI users can download RadeonPro and set the "Flip Queue Size" to zero. Intel users can go fuck themselves.

That's why I cap everything at 60. A lot of games have these kinds of bugs but until computers become powerful enough you don't see them. Unreal for example starts acting weird at high framerates so I capped that game at 60, and I think that started me capping other things at 60 and then I wanted to just do it at the driver level to be done with it. The problem is that for some old games, even that is too high. Wolfenstein 3D acts abnormally if the framerate goes over I think exactly 17. For the original DOOM they did the smart thing and capped it at 35 to prevent things that were tied to rendering performance from acting up. I'm pretty sure that D2X-XL fixed the homing bug a while ago, decoupling it from framerate. You could look at how that was done and implement it the same way in Rebirth but I know how he is about changes.

Bloodshot, on 02 July 2016 - 12:23 PM, said:

XL? "Horror stories" is a very tame way of putting it. The guy is absolutely nuts.

deuxsonic, on 02 July 2016 - 03:13 PM, said:

It's because Rebirth is the "purist" port so nothing that adds onto their precious shiny vanilla Descent is allowed into mainline.

Anyway, the Rebirth guys are a lot more reasonable to deal with than the XL guy... Which is, in fact, why I support Rebirth (that, and the fact XL is an unrecognizable, bloated mess).

To me it's not a problem that both coexist except for petty community infighting.

Duke of Hazzard, on 08 July 2016 - 02:27 PM, said:

Strangely enough, I did manage to get the PS1 cinematics into XL at one point which made it into his port and around that time he had a download for a low-quality encoding of them. MVE is such an obscure format and it would have been far more efficient to encode them using a different codec (practical even, to allow everyone to play with the cinematics at the perceived quality on the PS1 disc) but without the support for any other video format in the port I couldn't do it any other way (so the cinematics ended up pushing the game to over a GB in size.)

The lack of even wanting to fix stuff led to me tinkering with Rebirth (this was probably a decade ago though.)

A while ago I checked out the Mac Descent demo running with D1X-Rebirth (the Mac demo data files are available from the DXX-Rebirth website). I should say that the high-resolution interface and HUD graphics are really neat (well, they're mostly identical to stuff from Descent II):

(two more shots hidden under the spoiler)

As of D1X-Rebirth v0.58.1, only some of the Mac high-resolution graphics have been implemented independently of the Mac data files. The port ships with the high-res fonts and menu screens as an optional add-on, but does not (yet) allow to use the Mac cockpit/HUD graphics. Furthermore, the Mac demo itself is even shorter than the DOS shareware version. Apparently in accord with some kind of tradition specific to the Mac platform, it only includes the first three levels of the game, thus being similar to the Test Flight demo version.

Also, for whichever reason D1X-Rebirth in its current state cannot utilise the Mac sound effects data, and has to rely on an external files with converted sounds (available here). There's also no music but that can be easily fixed with the external music pack.

My interest in Descent source ports led me to the earlier D2X project, where I discovered the Mac demo of Descent II. This one is three levels long just like the DOS demo, but the DOS one does not include high-resolution graphics while the same are the default for the Mac version. I managed to run an early build of the D2X and while buggy and feature-incomplete it supports the Mac demo data, including sound effects (but not music which probably utilises some unsupported Mac specific format). However the DXX-Rebirth website makes no mention of the Mac demo so at first I assumed that this version was unsupported. Today I decided to check out the Mac demo with D2X-Rebirth and it indeed runs pretty well:


The demo includes a high-resolution version of the slide show intro, which was dropped in the full game in favour of the animated intro cinematic:

(I'm not sure if the text is always correctly aligned though)

Another notable feature of the Mac version is the high-quality sound effects.

Not sure wherevto post it, so I'll put it here: Overload just had it's release date moved to Fall 2017, but in a few weeks we should get revised and updated teaser demo. Yay..

I just learned that the Descent trilogy is back at GOG.com:
https://www.gog.com/..._descent_series

I posted about it in the Sale thread.

Thanks, Mr. Flibble! I just tweeted that on my "Cockpit Games"™ channel ;-)
https://twitter.com/Thunder_Owl

Missing them on Steam so it would be great to see them get back there.

MrFlibble, on 26 November 2017 - 10:28 AM, said:

As far as I understand it, those games were originally taken off of GOG due to the IP owners not getting paid their royalties by the publisher.

The royalties have been paid, thus the Descent trilogy is back on GOG.

Here's a little something that appears to have been inspired by Descent: Mining Station Theta.

MrFlibble, on 21 March 2020 - 04:28 AM, said:

Thanks for this hint!